Hama-Sana
The area planted with the tobacco crop in the lands under the supervision of the General Authority for the Management and Development of the Forest during the current agricultural season amounted to 515 hectares, according to the Director of Plant Resources in the Authority, Engineer Wafiq Zaroof.
In a statement to SANA reporter, Zarouf explained that the General Tobacco Corporation is working to encourage farmers to grow tobacco by providing incentives and marketing facilities, which contributed to increasing the demand for its cultivation.
Zaroof pointed out that tobacco cultivation has now become one of the important agricultural crops and constitutes a remunerative source of income for many families in the tobacco-growing areas, which are concentrated in Suqaylabiyah.
He said that tobacco cultivation requires specific steps with high costs and requires great efforts by farmers, starting from plowing, irrigation and fertilizing to the stage of picking and drying the leaves by spreading tobacco threads on special ropes called sawmills. A number of farmers, including Jamal Hammoud and Bassam Salhab, spoke about the high costs of the tobacco cultivation process, especially fuels, fertilizers and labor wages, which led to a decline in the cultivated areas in the Al-Ghab area, demanding to raise marketing prices to match the cost of production.
Other farmers called for the necessity of providing irrigation water and granting farmers easy in-kind loans to secure production requirements such as seeds, seedlings and fertilizers, establishing special sawmills and ovens by the General Tobacco Corporation, and adopting more than one type of tobacco for cultivation in the Al-Ghab area.
Suhad Hassan
SANA Economic Bulletin
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